They do it, and they do it well. Clashing together urban and classical art forms, the Flying Steps breakdance crew make the kind of magic that won them four world breakdance championships, only they do it to music from Johan Sebastian Bach.
Subscribe now for unlimited access.
$0/
(min cost $0)
or signup to continue reading
Partnering with Red Bull, the project is called Red Bull Flying Bach and is the brainchild of Vartan Bassil and Christoph Hagel. Wanting to show everything you can achieve through the medium of breakdance, the idea came about when Bassil approached Hagel searching for a new direction to take the Flying Steps.
"We needed something more special, like a challenge, something that nobody has tried before," Bassil says. Hagel came back with the idea of breakdancing to Bach, specifically his compositions called the Well-Tempered Clavier.
"It was like totally different," Bassil says of their adventure into the world of Bach. "Normal break beats or a normal hip hop track, you can count it. So we learn all our lives to count the music, and it's really easy…But in classical music you cannot count it how we counted it before. It is a different rhythm."
This meant the crew underwent an intense period of analysing the music to solve the problems it presented. "We studied the music, we'd workshop piece by piece. Sometimes we listened to the music 100 times to really understand, to listen out for the voices or to listen to how this music builds, and to also find the right style, the right moves for these pieces."
It was a lot of extra work, Bassil says. "For a hip hop track, for one minute normally we need like one day and it's choreographed, but with classical music from Bach, sometimes we need one week to find the right things, the right moves and the right steps."
Since the project started in Germany in 2010 things have gone great guns for the genre-smashing dance crew. "It's been, like, crazy," says Bassil. "At first it was just an art project. It was really important I think for us, especially in Germany, that people understand that what we do. Breakdancing, it is an art. So that was our first move and why we wanted to do this with the classical music, to get [to] the high culture."
Initially intending for the project to only have a life in Germany, things soon changed. "After we had the premiere here in Berlin it was so successful that the 10 performances over 10 days was sold out," Bassil says.
On the back of this, they planned a tour of Germany. More was to come. The German tour went so well that they spoke to Red Bull about plans of going international. "And now we are four years on the road with this project world wide," Bassil says.
Already having a strong reputation in breakdancing circles, putting a show like the Red Bull Flying Bach together was somewhat of a graduation for the crew.
"We are authentic," Bassil says of their approach. "We never try to do things that we cannot do. We are true to ourselves. And it's like in the hip hop scene, everybody's battling, it's also when you go to competitions, you have to battle somebody. And this we take in our other projects. So when we choreograph something, or when we produce something, every time in our mind we have to battle the audience, and we have to show how artful, how powerful what we do is."
Red Bull Flying Bach
When: Saturday 13 September
Where: Canberra Theatre, Civic.
Tickets: from $89.90 full, $79.90 Concession. Tickets available from redbull.com
National dates are:
